PicoBlog

In a just world, we’d be feting legendary actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s 55th birthday this month — and likely some new performance that made our jaws drop. Instead, we once again stop to reflect on the hole left in our cinema from his absence.

I find myself thinking often about PSH or returning to watch clips of his legendary screen performances, though I’ve done nowhere near as much thinking about the man or his work than my guest on today’s newsletter, Jonah Koslofsky. From 2020 to 2021, he wrote a weekly column for The Spool cleverly titled “P.S.H. I Love You” where he watched every single film featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The result is a remarkably comprehensive look at a singular career cut short in 2014 by the actor’s heroin overdose.

“P.S.H. I Love You” places Hoffman at the center of the frame, a place he largely avoided as an actor. I wanted to pick up where the column left off to talk all things PSH with Jonah, so we got on video chat and talked about why we both gravitate towards his acting — and picked out some streamable highlights from his brief yet illustrious filmography.

What do you think makes Philip Seymour Hoffman so special as an actor?

There's no non-pretentious way to put this, but I feel like he was an actor's actor. There's the movie star thing which is, as I understand it, essentially playing versions of yourself no matter what role you're doing. And then there's the more stage-like, "I will descend into this role, I will completely lose myself in the character, and you'll forget that there's another person even there," and I feel like the titans of that school in cinema are people like Daniel Day-Lewis or Brando. But with PSH, I feel like he was the best, there's almost no debating it in my head. He was *so* good at what he did. People think he's phoning it in on stuff like The Hunger Games, I don't think he is in that. He didn't pull the spotlight away because he just did his job.

You put him in the company of DDL and Brando, two actors who I think are very in your face about their acting sometimes, whereas PSH was very content to just do his thing and become the character. He always "understood the assignment," to use the language of that meme, and showed a versatility that those other actors didn't necessarily.

From what I know about him, he really took his job and his craft seriously, but not too seriously. There was still room in his career for stuff like Mission: Impossible III, Along Came Polly, and The Hunger Games. He was working for a living, but he was also doing the most boundary-pushing work. He played so many different types, and he played them so well. I think of the repressed loners, and then tangential to that are the artists that he played, and then you have the assholes that he played so well. If his career showed anything, it's that he was able to play these other parts.

Hoffman started off as more of a character actor and progressed into more leading roles but never took the unironic hero or star parts. How did you come to regard the dichotomy of him embodying both things?

The way that I started looking at him and his choices, in terms of what he was doing in Hollywood and in movies, was that all of that was secondary to his work on stage. Whenever he was in a movie — obviously, not at the beginning, when you're trying to establish yourself so that you can have that greater freedom — he really exercised that freedom [he’d earned].

Did you find his untimely death cast a shadow over the filmography or colored certain roles in a different light?

The stuff that I thought about the most was the artistic relationships that he was developing and that was very important to him that still would have continued for decades after he passed. The one that comes to mind obviously is Paul Thomas Anderson — he would have been in every other PTA movie going forward, it wouldn't have been a question. But also to me, I was starting to think about him as just a guy instead of a guy playing a specific role. Obviously, my ability to conceptualize him is totally compromised. I never met him. I never saw his Broadway work. It's such a loss that, to me, doesn't hang over any role that much specifically, but it hangs over just him.

What do you make of PTA casting his son, Cooper Hoffman, in Licorice Pizza and vicariously keeping his collaboration alive in a weird way?

When the first trailer for Licorice Pizza came out, I watched it and just start crying. Cooper looks so much like him, and the way Anderson is tapping into that asshole-y, schlubby, romantic persona with Cooper, especially in the first trailer, really got to me. Once the actual movie was out, it was a lot easier for me to separate the two. Cooper Hoffman is a pretty great actor, and Anderson knows exactly what he's doing with him in that part. There is a separation there for me.

Is there any role in the past few years you could see PSH playing?

He’d have been Thanos! [laughs] Zero doubt in my mind.

Actually, do you know who I think has stepped into that void? Adam Driver.

Absolutely.

They obviously have such different physicalities and energies, but they share an understanding how their presence affects other people … and then how to leverage that unconventional shape to make their outbursts land. Plus, they both are so versatile and love working with great directors.

It’s just nice to have real actors! That’s not to put others down, but some people are here because they know what they’re doing.

For the quintessential PSH role, you said Capote (available on HBO Max), which is interesting to me. Obviously, that's the one movie that he has his Academy Award for, which always struck me as odd to be the one that they recognized him for.

I had seen Capote at Ebertfest in 2014 right after PSH passed. I was 16, and I thought, "Oh, good movie!" And then, gearing up to start the project, I rewatched it and the second watch revealed it is a movie about acting. It is fully about a guy who is doing everything in his power to get inside the head of another guy. He has his subjects available to him, and he's trying to capture them with as little artifice or filling in his own interpretation of their psychologies. Capote, throughout that movie, is trying to become these guys. It's an all-consuming process, and it winds up hurting him.

That's what PSH was doing with Capote, but I think that's also what his entire life's work was about. It was about doing this work, getting these performances, and doing them as well as he absolutely could ... and then not being able to leave it at the door. It's a boilerplate biopic on paper, the prestige drama where an actor you know transforms into this historical figure that you have an image of. It is all those things, technically, but Bennett Miller, the director and lifelong friend of PSH, really let Hoffman take the reins on that movie. And I think it becomes something else in the process, the rare biopic that actually transcends its limitations. And that's all Hoffman.

He didn't play all that many real people. There's the manager in Moneyball...

Owning Mahowny, I think, is another real guy. And Charlie Wilson's War.

But certainly, no one with the same level of cultural awareness is Truman Capote. I don't think of him as really an impressionist, which is why I think it's hard not to see him receiving the highest honor for somebody else who existed and having a lot to slip into. And I think so much of his magic is in the things that he cuts from whole cloth.

Absolutely. But I think there is objectively a similarity between how Capote was approaching writing In Cold Blood and Hoffman's process in general — and the motivation there. It gets to this point where it's him creating an impression, but ALSO him pulling from himself to actually bring the truth to them.

My quintessential might throw you for a loop: Boogie Nights (available on Netflix).

Oh, yeah.

When I was really thinking about it, what makes PSH such a unique force on screen is that he's so aware of his physicality and the way that he takes up space. Nowhere is that better done in Boogie Nights. In a weird, paradoxical way, in order to play somebody who is so awkward as a character, the performer has to be hyperaware. Here, you get that physicality mixed with the real emotional vulnerability that you see peek out but then bursts like a geyser at the scene by the car. It's chaos, and his character Scotty is completely unable to read that moment.

Yes, I agree with you a bajillion percent! That's the one that put him on everybody's radar. I think that's probably purely efficient performance. Two scenes! He's in other scenes as well, but he gets two scenes, and he's seared into your eyeballs.

But he's lurking in the background in so many scenes. The more that you watch that movie, you start to notice some of the things in the background ... your eye always goes to him. Anyone else would just be dawdling, or there wouldn't be a purpose behind it. But no, that is exactly how awkward that person would be at that moment.

Yes, and I think Anderson knows exactly how good he is. I think he knows how to just button scenes with just one look at Philip Seymour Hoffman's body language. that's all you need to put a pin on this whole big thing. That movie is so expansive. It's going in a million directions.

I think you can kind of sum up a lot of PSH characters with the line from Magnolia, which is not by or about him, but Donny says, "I really do have love to give, I just don't know where to put it!"

Repressed! That's the word I always gravitate toward.

You never quite know how he's gonna react in a moment because there is this inability to translate, through words or body language, what the character is actually feeling. And it often comes out inappropriately or incorrectly. There are so many different ways a director can spin the awkwardness, for tragedy or comedy.

This, again, is why he was the best! That ability to add depth is what acting is. To make the character linger, to expand the psychology from just words, that's what he did.

Onto best, which I don't think will surprise you, this is one where we overlap. It's undeniable, right?

It's The Master (available on Showtime Anytime and to rent from various digital providers)!

He is the master.

It's a staggering performance. It's almost playing a real person. He gets you, as the audience, so close to this character but also so far from him in just the perfect ratio. It's the absolute apex of two great artists working together.

I think the thing that sticks with me the most as I've revisited it is the fact that he can play a character who is simultaneously so terrifying to us but also very charismatic. You understand why Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is drawn to him. This love that he has for this other man, this broken soul, is both self-serving and self-sacrificial. You never quite get to understand what is at the root of it, which is the beautiful mystery of the film.

They're two weird guys.

They're both broken, to be clear!

He's so trapped by his own bullshit. In a lot of ways, he's living the American dream. He's conquered and built his own reality completely, and now he just can't get out of it. And I think he doesn't really want to get out of it. But he also longs for a genuine connection with something that's outside of his own cult. I would join The Cause!

When he sings "Slow Boat to China" in his final scene, I don't think there's any other actor who could play that without making me want to laugh. I don't think there's anybody who could sell the drama and the emotion of that so convincingly without a hint of winking irony.

Kyle Turner wrote a piece for Roger Ebert a while ago about friendship breakups, and I think about it a lot. He's talking specifically about how good of a job Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach do at dramatizing those. They're a really hard thing to put on screen. The closest that I can think of someone doing what Hoffman is doing in that scene in The Master is Adam Driver in Marriage Story when he's singing "Being Alive." There's something about the fact that the relationship between Freddy and Lancaster is not explicitly romantic. In some ways, there's almost more that's being lost. There's more that's on the table. He communicates how hard it is to lose someone because you can't control them.

I have another scene to dig into on The Master because you had pinpointed it as one you didn't care for as much in your piece: when Lancaster ends an argument by yelling "pig FUCK" at someone interrogating him about The Cause. I interviewed Jesse Plemons and had to ask him about working with PSH on The Master, and he told a great story about how that moment came together:

I have so many good memories from that, but one that sticks out that I’ll never forget … there’s this sequence in the movie where they go to this fundraiser and someone speaks out against Dodd. He starts badgering him and berating him with questions. We’d been shooting that scene for a long time; it was almost lunch. Paul usually does quite a few takes, and it seemed like Phil was reaching a point where [he] didn’t know what he wanted. Paul had to just walk up to them, look at his hairline, and pluck a hair out. Like, what the fuck?!

And then I’m pretty sure what the next take he reaches a place that he hadn’t in previous takes, and out comes the pig fuck line: “You pig FUCK!” Then it was like, “Alright, that’s lunch!” We were all just totally in awe, mouths on the floor. We actually ended up reshooting that scene in a different location with a different actor. “Pig fuck” carried over to the reshoot and made it in. I think about that a lot. Just one of a kind, no one like him.

I think that speaks to the specific and beautiful friendship between PSH and PTA. Anderson had to know that this was pissing Hoffman off. He knew, "Okay, if I push him even further, that's gonna get us where we need to go." There's a trust there, you couldn't do that to somebody who it's your first movie working with.

Let's move on to your favorite. What did you pick?

Magnolia (available on Paramount+ and to rent from various digital providers), all the way! I have a real soft spot for Magnolia. I feel like, as a whole, that movie does not BS how big things feel and how impossible it is to get over loss and trauma. You are constantly becoming your parents even as you're mad at them. The way that Hoffman is asked to be this warm, caring, and positive presence in the midst of a world that is unfixable is so incredible. I think so much about the scene where the other nurse comes to relieve him, and he says no. Can you imagine? I'm there in Phil's "head," and I believe his goodness. Like, people aren't trustworthy! People aren't good! They're all broken, that's the whole point of the movie. But I believe that he is actually trying to fix it, and I believe he can ... a little bit.

I don't think of him as really having that many films where he's an unabashed force for good, and rarely is he the emotional center of something. But I do think it's interesting because I think my favorite casts him in a somewhat similar vein: Lester Bangs in Almost Famous (available on Starz and to rent from various digital providers).

It's kind of a given to identify with this character for people who start writing really young. He's the patron saint of the uncool. He's speaking to the people who don't feel like they're the leading man in the story — he's speaking to those who feel like they're the supporting character. He gives you the tough love talk that no one's coming to shine the spotlight on you, there's no guarantee that you are the leading man in your own life, but you have something that is valuable and worthwhile to share with people. Especially for people watching Almost Famous at a young age like William, who are oftentimes very impressionable folks, he's like a friend and mentor. He gives you a pat on the back and tells you life is tough, but it's all gonna be alright.

He's so giving, and he's great in that as well.

I think the commonality between these two films that we're talking about is really interesting. Towards the end of his career, especially if you want to inscribe the tragedy of his passing into it, something that is very central to the PSH ethos is the idea that he can take on the pain of others. He can absorb all these really difficult emotions and try to process them for people to spit them out into something that they can then use. I don't think we always see the toll that that takes on him. It's hard for me not to think about the fact that oftentimes he was the one who was telling you it was all right whenever his reality did not suggest as much.

I will just push back on this to say that I did see a talk that Hoffman did where someone was comparing Magnolia and Almost Famous because they have scenes where characters all break into song. He was so indignant at the thought of those two movies being compared.

Well, that's kind of a dumb comparison! That's not the same.

Let's move to underrated.

I mean, they're all underrated. It's hard to pick one!

Let's talk about your pick, The Savages (available to rent from various digital providers).

A great movie about death! I'm in my mid-twenties, and I'm lucky enough to say that both my parents are still alive. But whenever I think about what the next 30 years of my life will probably end up looking like, on some level, I think about The Savages. He's such a piece of work in that movie. It's a great performance and you still find yourself kind of rooting for him. That shitty academic thing...

He's in such denial of what a loser he is.

Yes!

He and Laura Linney play so well as siblings together. I don't think there's great sibling cinema in general, and I think one of the things that that movie gets so well — and what he's so great at doing — is capturing the ways in which it becomes very easy for siblings to score points to make themselves feel better by trying to put the other person down.

And they're both going through this monumental collapse. They both don't have the time that they need with and away from their dad and from each other. He nails the laziness that you can fall into when things are unfixable, in this case.

The scene that sticks out in my head from that movie is the one where Linney's character Wendy has to come clean about how she's swindling FEMA, and he gently roasts her. In a career that is full of striking very tricky balances, him being very funny in that scene in that movie without becoming so mean that he's unsympathetic is really remarkable.

At the same time, though, he's totally a shitty academic. My parents are both academics, and I have been around maybe shitty academics. He nails that! Those guys are losers, but they've found some kind of security at an institution. Whatever, I don't need to dunk on every academic right now because PSH is doing that in his performance.

My underrated is Mission: Impossible III (available on Showtime Anytime and to rent from various digital providers). That's probably the first movie of his that I saw because he made such adult films that I can't imagine there was anything else I would have been exposed to before. Man, he is so terrifying! In the scene on the plane whenever he's delivering the monologue that's in the trailer, I completely believe his menace. I don't believe that there is a caring bone in your body right now. Especially when you foil it against a lot of his characters who can play tough but oftentimes show the cracks in the façade, this cold and calculating villain is absolutely spine-chilling.

I think we're also at a point where the magic of J.J. Abrams has completely dried up. He's very clearly not a visionary, and I think his work has shown this.

He's a very competent imitator.

But I think he's pretty good with performance! He knows how to get pretty good performances out of his actors. The magic of the Mission: Impossible movies is that they're all a little bit different. The fact that PSH ended up getting cast in the one that had the director who's good at working with performance, something about that just lined up. He's terrifying, and I wish he was just in the movie more.

The films have rarely found a foil who's at the level of Tom Cruise.

Yes!

Cruise is such a force, and he's placed opposite these cardboard villains. Maybe the physical element of challenge is better for Cruise, but I don't think any of the other films have even come close to finding what he has with PSH. Beyond just a battle of logistics, it's a battle of wills. One of them has to absolutely break as a person.

And it's a testament to Hoffman's performance because I don't think the movie knows how good Hoffman is. He's not the main villain! There's Billy Crudup, the man behind the Rabbit's Foot, who is totally unmemorable in that role. Good actor, but the performance that sears its way past the words on the page is all Hoffman.

His character Owen Davian feels a bit like the last gasp of an age in which we had really unironic villains. Since the prestige TV mentality of antiheroes in The Sopranos and Breaking Bad snuck into cinema, we often have to humanize the bad guy or see him as misunderstood. And Davian is just like, "I'm pure evil."

I feel like the Mission: Impossible movies are still holding on to full evil in their villains. They just haven't found someone who does it as well as Hoffman.

Most surprising: you said A Late Quartet (available to rent from various digital providers).

That was one that I just totally hadn't heard of before starting the project and really didn't know anything before getting into it. It's another one, like Capote, where the PSH behind the camera is bleeding into the performance. He plays Robert Gelbart, a second violinist in a quartet that has nobody else in a second chair. Their first violinist, played by Christopher Walken, is diagnosed with Parkinson's. So everybody else in the quartet is like, "we're gonna need to find a new first violinist." And he's like, I'm right here!" It's pretty good.

Hoffman just so fully takes this character's psychology, his insecurities, the things that he's right about, the things that he's wrong about, and brings them to the surface in a way that totally nails what the character deserves. If you're gonna put this guy on screen, you've got to do him justice, and he so fully does. He's pulling from a life of not being top billing, but the real PSH was apparently so much more okay with not being that guy.

I wonder if he's playing out the fantasy in which maybe he's not okay with that and letting out some of those frustrations.

Absolutely, I think that's totally true.

I saw this 10 years ago and remember it being a very even-keeled film where the repressed anger of PSH coming out is all the more impactful because it is such a tonal clash with what the rest of the film has been.

And such a total clash with the milieu. When I think of classical performance, I don't think of steaming resentment. Of course, that's there! But highbrow people, engaging with this in a very distant way, you can understand how someone wouldn't engage with that because of his performance.

With classical music, you're appreciating art as a technical skill as much as anything. You care about the product more than the personality. So maybe the film is somewhat in keeping with the PSH mentality of exposing the beating heart behind it all.

That's so beautiful, I love it!

For a total 180 from A Late Quartet, my pick for most surprising is Along Came Polly (available for free with ads on Tubi and to rent from various digital providers). All his scenes in that movie are phenomenal. He enters that movie by tripping at a wedding, and you're just like, "This is insane!" And he plays this ridiculous character Sandy Lyle so straight-faced.

It's such a flex, too, to be at that point in his career when all of the hard work was so fully paying off to just be like, "No, I'm going to do my best performance in a pretty okay comedy!" He so fully nails it. It's amazing.

I saw a tweet recently where someone insinuated this role was so clearly written for Jack Black, and I just totally reject that premise historically and spiritually. This is not a fully comedic part in that it just calls for him to come in and be a buffoon. Playing that archetype of washed-up and disgruntled actor who thinks that he deserves so much better embodies fading glory. My favorite scene in the film is the rehearsal at the community theater where Sandy decides to just start singing a song that's not his and tries to bully the actual actors playing Jesus into just going with it. The unchecked ego of it is insane! It's the perfect amount of burlesquing that type of character but also completely identifiable with the type of actor who would pull that kind of shenanigans.

And that feels like letting out of his frustrations of being in this world where it's all ego and meeting other actors who are all just about themselves. And then he's over here actually trying to do the job. Have you seen Twister?

It's been a very long time, so much so that I don't really remember him in it.

Yeah, that's where he invented Jack Black, in my opinion!

To your earlier point, he's never stealing the spotlight. It is clearly Ben Stiller's movie, but his scenes are so great and memorable. He also helps to make sense of like the weird romance of the film. If we wonder why a risk-averse guy Reuben like would be attracted to someone as flighty as Polly in the first place, it's because he already has a very chaotic presence in his life by way of Sandy. He has some sort of pain tolerance for this.

Beautiful. I'd never thought of it like that!

My thanks to Jonah for a conversation so expansive that I decided to siphon my usual consumption diary to make space for more of our talk. You can find him on Twitter at @Koslofskyspeaks and find his writing at The Spool.

Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall

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